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Announcing the 2025 Nova Media Fellows

August 29, 2025

We’re delighted to announce our 2025-26 cohort of Nova Media Fellows, whose ambitious year-long projects will connect the dots between science, health, and well-being. This year, the fellowship includes three journalists and two nonprofit newsrooms. 

Please join us in welcoming our new cohort:

Juhie Bhatia is a freelance journalist passionate about stories that drive social and cultural change. Her work will reimagine the built environment as a pathway to foster connection and reduce loneliness and isolation.

Tasmiha Khan is an award-winning journalist with degrees in neuroscience and psychology. She will examine the profound biological, psychological, and social transformations that caregivers—mothers, fathers, and grandparents—undergo while raising children.

The NPR Climate Desk harnesses the strengths of existing national and international coverage to create a better informed public with a deeper understanding of climate issues. For NPR, reporter Alejandra Borunda will seek to measure the human toll of climate change and explore how more accurate reporting of climate deaths can influence policies that help people stay healthy and safe. 

Reasons to be Cheerful celebrates and amplifies ideas found in surprising places, with a keen focus on uplifting joy and accessibility. Their work will investigate the health impacts of environmental noise: the science, the solutions, and the lived experiences.

Rochelle Sharpe headshot

Rochelle Sharpe is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and a pioneer in data-driven reporting. Her work will explore the preventative and healing impact of positive experiences on health.

“Today, science is increasingly under threat, but it remains essential to solving our most pressing issues,” said Professor Brian Berman, MD, Nova Institute President and Founder. “By sharing stories that highlight the complex factors that shape health and lift up scientific, evidence-based solutions, these Fellows are helping to build greater understanding and inspire action. We are proud to support their work.”

We are grateful to all of the terrific applicants who submitted proposals this year, a testament to the wide array of news outlets and reporters doing exceptional work to bring science and health reporting to their communities. 

Launched in 2023, the Nova Media Fellows program supports outstanding print, digital, and broadcast journalists and nonprofit newsrooms reporting on the complex, intertwined factors that affect health and well-being. Their work is grounded in science; reflects a broad vision of health; and elevates critical ideas, questions, and debates. Read about the program and previous fellows.

We anticipate opening applications for next year’s Media Fellowship in April 2026. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive all the latest updates.

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We extend our thanks to Nova’s Media Advisory Council, which has shared invaluable expertise to help shape the program and review Media Fellow applicants: Virginia Hubbell (Former Executive Director, Mental Insight Foundation), Jackie Judd (Former Vice President and Executive Producer of Multimedia, Kaiser Family Foundation), Jayne O’Donnell (Founder & CEO, Youthcast Media Group), Meaghan Parker (Council for Advancement of Science Writing), John Schidlovsky (Founding Director, International Reporting Project), and Rich Stone (Senior Science Editor, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios).  
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Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.